Well, here’s my new example when students in my human rights class insist that different cultures just have different — but equally valuable — understandings of human rights and thus that no government should tell any other government how to treat its citizens:

The executions of seven Saudis sentenced to death by crucifixion and firing squad have been postponed for a week.

A Saudi security official said King Abdullah would review the sentences. He met families of the seven on Sunday.

The official said the ruler of the south-western province of Asir, Prince Faisal bin Abdel Aziz, had ordered the postponement.

The seven were juveniles at the time they were arrested for armed robbery, a capital offence in Saudi Arabia. One told Associated Press by telephone from prison that they were tortured to force them to confess and denied access to lawyers.

Saudi Arabia was one of eight countries that originally abstained during the General Assembly vote on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

In an attempt to make clear that Todd Akin ran into trouble because he’s a moral absolutist and not simply because he’s a mysogynist, Matt Steinglass took to the Economist’s Democracy in America blog to write some truly bizarre things about morality and relativism:

Personally, I’m proud to be a moral relativist. In fact I’d go further: I think even the most moral moral absolutists cannot be as moral as the most moral moral relativists. Human beings, after all, aren’t computer programs, and the idea that a simple and consistent set of rules will get you to justice, optimal utility, virtue, or any other telos you could name seems absurd.

To begin, I suppose it’s important to note that Steinglass’ claim either makes no sense or is meaningless. What he’s claiming is that, when he creates the category of morality and fills it entirely with his opinions, the people with whom he disagrees on matters like abortion are clearly less moral than the people with whom he agrees.

To put this another way, Steinglass is incredibly proud of himself for reaching the conclusion that millions of college freshmen have reached, namely that there’s no such thing as morality, that everything we happen to believe to be right or true is wholly contingent, and that only good things can happen when we embrace the notion that everything is as good as everything else because that gives us space to just live and let live.

As he writes:

[B]eing a good person requires a certain comfort level with shades of grey. You need to be able to embrace propositions that are, at some level, potentially at odds with each other.

In other words, everyone’s a little bit different and so everyone has different opinions and beliefs. And who are we to say that one idea is right while another is wrong. They can both be a little bit right and a little bit wrong.

Except Todd Akin’s ideas, which are — in Steinglass’ words — “monstrosities.” What makes them monstrosities? Well, Steinglass doesn’t agree with them. And he doesn’t agree, apparently, because he thinks they are the products of absolutist thinking. I also happen to disagree with Akin’s ideas. But I could come up with a perfectly good absolutist reason for my disagreement [see below] rather than a wishy-washy non-argument that says, “Everyone’s beliefs are as good as everyone else’s because there’s no single truth out there … except for the people with whom I disagree; those people are just flat-out wrong.”

In any event, here’s how Steinglass “solves” the abortion debate:

Where exactly does the line fall between a clump of cells whose interests should count for very little compared to those of the full-fledged person it’s inside, and a nearly-developed human baby whose interests should count for a lot? I don’t know. There isn’t one. We have to draw some lines, for legal purposes, and they’re going to be arbitrary, relative, and non-absolute. People should be comfortable with that.

That’s a complete dodge.

There is a massive problem that affects millions and millions of lives. And the answer for how to address the problem that we get from Steinglass’ brand of morality is “I don’t know.” Let’s all get comfortable with completely arbitrary lines that we draw for no reason at all. Why? Because that’s not monstrous and it isn’t a fairy tale. Let’s allow a bunch of human lives to be taken. Why? Because of some belief I have for which I have no good argument. Or, let’s allow no human lives to be taken. Why? Again, because of some belief I have for which I have no good argument.

I happen to be of the opinion that the problem with Todd Akin isn’t going to be solved by exposing him to the grey shades that will help him to recognize when it’s appropriate to abort fetuses. Why not? Because the problem is that his understanding of morality is entirely uncritical: No fetuses should ever be aborted because every fetus is a rights-bearing human person from the moment of conception.

And why is that exactly?

<crickets chirping>

But this is also the problem with Steinglass’ embrace of relativism. He is so desperate to avoid any connection to the vices of the Todd Akins of the world — namely their problematic, uncritical certainties — that he thoughtlessly embraces the complete absence of certainty and calls it a virtue. But it’s not a virtue … because, if Steinglass was thinking carefully, he’d know there ought not to be any such thing as a virtue. The radical uncertainty of relativism should really be seen as no better and no worse than the complete certainty of Akin’s absolutism. A good relativist would just note that these are two different ways of thinking … and that there are probably a bunch of other ways of thinking too.

I’ve written at some length in the past about abortion (here and here, for example). At its core, the argument is that we can allow for virtually all of the abortions that currently happen and also limit some abortions that might be particularly troublesome. It’s based on the <gasp> morally absolutist notions of human dignity, human personhood, and human rights. I can’t say whether Steinglass would see my argument as a monstrosity or a fairy tale but I suppose he’d have to do so since it’s based on another absolutist notion, namely that truths about human biology give us insight into the problem of abortion.

And making a truth claim, a good moral relativist should tell you, is really just my way of trying to disguise my opinion as a fact; since it’s all really just shades of grey, after all, the truth is relative.

Not long ago, I happened upon the blog of Scott Allison, a professor of psychology at the University of Richmond. Allison has co-authored one book on heroism and he has another on the way.

This bit, from a blog post last month, is from a forthcoming journal article (as well as the forthcoming book):

Below is the taxonomy of heroes that we propose in Understanding Exceptional Leadership. We elaborate on these ten kinds of heroes in an article that will appear this summer in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Goethals & Allison, 2012).

Having thought quite a bit about heroism myself over the past few years, I’m incredibly curious about this taxonomy of heroism that Allison proposes … in no small part because it seems so clearly wrong to me in so many ways.

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Chris Blattman, who wrote an excellent critical piece on Invisible Children back in 2009, has been on vacation during the “Kony 2012” firestorm. He wrote a post this morning from Hanoi that provides additional nuance and that might even be read as something of a defense of Invisible Children:

To give credit where it is due, scratch beneath the surface, and Invisible Children take a more nuanced view than they get credit for (or showcase). Their self-defense is here, and it’s a reasonable one. Also, my (admittedly limited) experience with their programs on the ground is that they are better than the average non-profit in northern Uganda. The bracelets are silly, but you could do worse than to support their field programs.

But let’s suppose for a moment that, on balance, everyone conforms to their worst stereotypes: the badvocacy organization is simplistic, self-aggrandizing, and adolescent; and the academics are so busy being nuanced and obscure that they are useless. (These are not hard things to suppose.)

Could, in spite of it all, the KONY 2012 campaign still lead to the right solution? I think the answer might be yes.

Suppose you believe (as I do) that capturing or killing Kony is the best of a bunch of bad options. And suppose you also believe (as I do) that, to capture or kill the man, Central African governments will need advanced military, intelligence, and special forces support.

This viral video, whatever its weaknesses, may get you closer to that objective than any other action I can think of.

You may not share my two premises. Or you may share them but mistrust (as you should) the West’s ability to intervene intelligently and effectively in Central Africa. You may also worry (as you should) that an ineffective military response will result in a rash of LRA raping and killing. Or perhaps you pause (as you ought to) as you realize that getting Kony probably means going through a wall of children, guns a-blazing.

I would feel more comfortable with Invisible Children if I saw them, somewhere, expressing some of these risks and costs and concerns. If I’ve missed it, help me out.

In the end I don’t think it matters. Central African militaries are incapable of bringing Kony in, and the West is unlikely to give serious help. I would like to be wrong on this, but I fear Seal Team Six is not gearing up to go.

Sadly, Kony will kill again and again, and in 2013 Invisible Children will have yet another over-sensational campaign.

[…]

What’s new and amazing is that, with the direction that coverage has taken, the average high school activist, donor and Congressman might just understand a little better what separates advocacy from badvocacy, and demand better in future. And that makes me hopeful.

The whole piece is well worth reading. My take on the whole “Kony 2012” campaign is a few days old now but it hits some of the same notes, namely that the campaign and the backlash against it raise some very important questions about the way that we think about human rights enforcement around the world. In particular, once a situation has been identified in which massive abuses of human rights are taking place, what do we do?

As Blattman says, we might have nothing on the table but the best of a bunch of bad options. That’s unfortunate, I think, but it’s reality. And it seems better to me to look closely at the best of a bunch of bad options rather than to content ourselves with no options at all.

Over at The Stone, Michael Boylan has a lengthy survey of some of the arguments for and against the idea of universal human rights. After setting out some of the better-known positions put forward by philosophers across the centuries, Boylan returns to the contemporary international turmoil with which he began in an attempt to bring home the importance of answering the question of whether or not there are natural human rights:

The way we think about the turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa is also conditioned by the way we understand human rights. If natural human rights exist, then the autocrats in charge that suppress them are wrong and they should either create a constitutional monarchy or a democratic republic. If natural human rights do not exist, then the whole process is one of political negotiation that on the one hand involves peaceful protests and on the other involves bloody civil war. Our entire understanding of these events requires us to take sides. But how can we do this?

Boylan’s answer to this question is, to my mind, much weaker than it needs to be. Indeed, he ultimately concludes that we ought to simply ask whether or not a) we would find it acceptable for some group to suffer ill-treament and then b) we would find it acceptable to suffer ill-treatment ourselves if we were members of that group:

I have a thought experiment that might help the reader decide what he or she thinks is the correct position:  imagine living in a society in which the majority hurts some minority group (here called “the other”). The reason for this oppression is that “the other” are thought to be bothersome and irritating or that they can be used for social profit.  Are you fine with that?  Now imagine that you are the bothersome irritant and the society wants to squash you for speaking your mind in trying to improve the community.  Are you fine with that?  These are really the same case.  Write down your reasons.  If your reasons are situational and rooted in a particular cultural context (such as adhering to socially accepted conventions, like female foot binding or denying women the right to drive), then you may cast your vote with Hart, Austin and Confucius. In this case there are no natural human rights. If your reasons refer to higher principles (such as the Golden Rule), then you cast your vote with the universalists: natural human rights exist. This is an important exercise. Perform this exercise with everyone you are close to — today — and tell me what you think.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with playing the game that Boylan wants us to play. But I don’t think it provides an answer to the question at the heart of Boylan’s piece, namely whether or not there exist natural human rights. It only tells us something we already know: that each of us believes we have rights (though not whether they’re natural) and not whether they extend to others. Indeed, as Richard Rorty argues, it doesn’t really take into account that fact that most abusers of human rights don’t consider their victims to be like them in the most decisive respect at all.

But, of course, I think we can do better than to scratch our heads when we arrive at the question of whether or not there are natural human rights. Indeed, one of the central chapters of my book is devoted to an argument for an objective grounding for the idea of human rights that applies universally. That is, a grounding for rights based in our common nature as human beings and not simply based on what I think about myself.

And that grounding, as I’ve also written about here and here, is human dignity:

[D]ignity is a function of our self-consciousness, our ability to talk and think about ourselves. As noted in the previous chapter, the Greek δόξα, from which dignity is derived, is defined as “the opinion which others have of one, estimation, repute.”[1] While this ancient concept was thought to rely on the way we were perceived by others, I want to argue that of far greater importance is the opinion we have of ourselves and, in particular, the stories we tell about ourselves. My dignity is bound up with my answer to the most fundamental identity question, “Who am I? [which] will normally address what is most salient in one’s sense of self.”[2] This narrative identity, DeGrazia notes, “involves our self-conceptions, our sense of what is most important to who we are.”[3]Bound up with my narrative identity is the sense that I can make something of myself; this ability to posit a future that I have a hand in shaping can be traced back at least as far as Nietzsche and has been updated by contemporary theorists like Ronald Dworkin – discussed in the previous chapter – and Richard Rorty, the subject of the next chapter. DeGrazia puts this especially cogently: “Much of what matters (to most of us, anyway) is our continuing existence as persons—beings with the capacity for complex forms of consciousness—with unfolding self-narratives and, if possible, success in self-creation.”[4]

At bottom, then, I want to argue that personhood and dignity are bound up together, that one cannot be a human person without the ability — derived from organized cortical brain activity — to feel as though there is a “I” in the center of one’s brain, pulling levers and adjusting dials (even though we know that, in fact, this is simply an evolutionary strategy developed by our genes to make ours brains better, more clever ones). This “I” amounts to a feeling of selfhood that, finally, accounts for our having dignity and being persons. As I conclude in my book, “It is, in my estimation, the feature that separates human persons from human animals and, so far as we know, from all other animals.”

While I have no doubt that some people will want to suggest problems with this argument — and I look forward to hearing them! — I think it’s a much stronger position than the one put forward above by Boylan, namely that we might ask ourselves whether or not we like the rights we feel we have and then suggest that we probably ought to extend them to others, as they might also like them.

[1] Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, revised and augmented by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 444.

[2] David DeGrazia, “Identity, Killing, and the Boundaries of Our Existence, Philosophy and Public Affairs 31(4) (Fall 2003), 423.

[3] Ibid., 424.

[4] Ibid.

I finally broke down and ordered Sam Harris’ new book, The Moral Landscape. It took me longer than it should have, given the subject matter, but I have to admit that I don’t much care for Harris’ previous work: there is something about the sort of self-righteous atheism he espouses in those books that really rubs me the wrong way.

That said, the central idea in his new book, of the possibility of constructing a conception of morality that is objective, universal, and based on human nature, is very appealing, given that the same sort of project stands at the heart of my first book (though, I think, without all of Harris’ ham-fisting rage-writing about religion/spirituality).

The new book has been recommended to me by numerous friends and watchers of his recent interview on The Daily Show. But, in truth, I kept putting off the purchase … especially after reading this book review by Troy Jollimore, who effectively accuses Harris of being a simple-minded charlatan (at least when it comes to reading moral philosophy). K. Anthony Appiah, whose review appeared in the New York Times, pretty much makes the same argument:

Harris was a philosophy major at Stanford, but he is inclined to scant most of what philosophers have had to say about well-being. There is, for example, a movement in contemporary philosophy and economics known as “the capabilities approach,” which takes seriously the question of identifying the components of well-being and measuring them. But neither of the two leading exponents of this approach — the philosopher and economist Amartya Sen and the philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum — gets a mention in the book.

So, then, why did I buy the book? I read the transcript of a lecture that Harris gave in which he both addresses Jollimore’s main complaint (which was published after Harris’ lecture, strangely), namely that he ignores an important argument by Robert Nozick in order to answer another argument made by Nozick, and also makes a strong argument against moral relativism, which is the part of the book that Appiah rightly tells me I’ll enjoy:

The truth is, science is not value-free. Good science is the product of our valuing evidence, logical consistency, parsimony, and other intellectual virtues. And if you don’t value those things, you can’t participate in the scientific conversation. I’m saying we need not worry about the people who don’t value human flourishing, or who say they don’t. We need not listen to people who come to the table saying, “You know, we want to the cut heads off adulterers at half-time at our soccer games because we have a book dictated by the Creator of the universe which says we should.” In response, we are free to say, “Well, you appear to be confused about everything. Your “physics” isn’t physics, and your “morality” isn’t morality.” These are equivalent moves, intellectually speaking. They are borne of the same entanglement with real facts about the way the universe is. In terms of morality, our conversation can proceed with reference to facts about the changing experiences of conscious creatures. It seems to me to be just as legitimate, scientifically, to define “morality” in this way as it is to define “physics” in terms of the behavior of matter and energy. But most people engaged in of the scientific study of morality don’t seem to realize this.

Frankly, that’s a great paragraph … and, whether or not it appears in the book, I’m interested enough in this sort of straightforward complaint against moral relativism that I’ll work through the whole thing to see if he can get from “complaint” to “argument.”